Since my last blog things have been fairly quiet until the weekend just gone when I took Santa and Webster to a clinic with Markus Gribbe at fellow blogger Natalie Allen’s new yard up in Warwickshire. It was a 3 hour drive up there, and we arrived around mid day to give the horses time to settle and relax in their stables before training in the afternoon.

I decided to ride Webster first because that was how we used to do it in Germany. As Natalie’s yard isn’t quite finished, we had to take a short hack from the stables round to the indoor school which was fun in the howling gale that blew across the Chilterns! However both my boys were very grown up, Webster I was especially pleased with because he hasn’t hacked out very much.

In Webster’s lessons (on both days) we worked on him going through to a good secure contact from behind, I also have problems with his bend to the left through corners and on circles and Markus helped me be really firm with my inside leg and made him do it! Then we worked on his canter to walk transitions which, before this weekend, we couldn’t do at all. But Markus got Webster sitting a lot better before the transition and making Webster wait on the edge of losing the canter and then ask for walk, and it worked first time! I was thrilled!

Webster wasn’t totally keen on all this hard work as by nature he’s a little idle, however he coped with both days and Markus was very pleased with the progress he’s made since January.

When it was Santa’s turn I had to explain to Markus that we couldn’t do any work on the changes as I’m completely avoiding them until after the Nationals especially since he put one in at the Regionals spontaneously! So instead we worked on polishing up the actual test we’re doing and finding those all important extra marks. For example Markus spotted that I wasn’t riding the last stride of the half pass which he said would take it from a 7 to a 6 and sometimes Santa wanders slightly off the track in the shoulder in. So we tightened everything up and I rode through the test on Sunday and earned a round of applause. Fingers crossed for the Nationals.

Now we’ve got a couple of warm-up shows between in preparation, which will give us a chance to put it all into practice and on the 11th we’re back to Stoneleigh!